The creation myth for Sergei Eisenstein’s final work is as vast in scale and resonance as any epic movie. Like most other Soviet filmmakers, Eisenstein was forced to flee east during the German invasion and near-capture of Moscow during World War II. Away from the capital, Eisenstein, whose relationship with the state and Stalin had gone through many rollercoaster switchbacks, had been ostracised when his initially successful Alexander Nevsky (1938) had been embarrassedly put away following the Non-Aggression Pact with Nazi Germany, and then rehabilitated after Operation Barbarossa. Eisenstein struck upon the idea of making a film about one of classical Russia’s most controversial figures: Tsar Ivan IV, the self-declared first “Tsar of All Russia,” whose nickname “Groznyy” (usually translated as “Terrible”) encompassed the awe-inspiring and fearsome figure he remained in the Russian memory. Stalin himself made no secret of his admiration and emulation of the man, and this helped Eisenstein get the project off the ground. The result was another of many fiascos that plagued Eisenstein: the second part of the proposed trilogy was shelved and left unseen for more than a decade, well after Eisenstein had died at only 50 years of age. Eisenstein’s film, whether deliberately or not, commences as an expressionist panegyric to ruthlessly strong leadership and curdles steadily into an hysterically gothic, insidious portrait of power corrupting. Ivan’s reign of blood, enforced by his cabal of loyal bodyguards, the Oprichniki, bore too potent a resemblance to Stalin’s purges and the horrors wreaked by the NKVD.

The actual film moves beyond the dead-ahead narrative simplicity of Alexander Nevsky, whilst pushing Eisenstein’s interest in stylising his cinema to the point where it started to resemble Wagner’s ideal of the “total work of art,” encompassing not only drama and visual artistry, but also music and a quality akin to dance, mime, and opera in the acting styles. During his stay in Mexico, Eisenstein’s friends Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo had encouraged him to regard his movies as “moving frescoes,” a phrase which describes much of Ivan the Terrible perfectly.

The first film commences with young Grand Prince of Muscovy Ivan being crowned with splendid pomp as the Tsar of the new super-state and declaring his nation as the third and enduring Rome. Ivan’s openly announced plan is to break the power of the aristocratic boyars, whose in-fighting and factional cynicism he blames not only for the deaths of his parents, but for keeping Russia from achieving unity against its enemies. His young fiancée Anastasia Romonova (Lyudmila Tselikovskaya) comes from a family that seems to be behind him, but Ivan’s friends are still few. At his wedding feast, one of Ivan’s friends, Prince Andrei Kurbsky (Mikhail Nazvanov) still tries to woo Anastasia, his former flame, and another, Fyodor Kolychev (Andrei Abrikosov), announces he’s going to avoid the inevitable power struggle by becoming a monk. The feast is interrupted by infuriated common folk, led by hulking Aleksei Basmanov (Amvrosi Buchma) and the chained, seer-like Nikolai (Vsevolod Pudovkin), who threaten to kill Ivan if he doesn’t follow through on his promise to break the boyars. To everyone’s surprise Ivan blesses Basmanov and repeats his vow.

Ivan faces many formidable opponents, but the most formidable is his own aunt, the fiendishly glowering boyarina Efrosinia Staritskaya (Serafima Birman), who wants to place her own simpleton son Vladimir (Pavel Kadochnikov) on the throne. Even neighbouring Kazan Khanate declares war on him, but Ivan, with Kurbsky as his general, musters a great military force and conquers Kazan instead. The potential power of a united Russia is confirmed, but Ivan falls ill while returning from the war, and the boyars, with Staritskaya leading, refuse to swear allegiance to Ivan’s infant son. Only Kurbsky emerges from this smelling like a rose, because while trying yet again to seduce Anastasia, he hears of Ivan’s recovery and so makes the pledge to the young prince. This pleases Ivan, who sends him off to war in the west against the Polish and Livonians, who are conspiring to stifle Russia’s trade with England. But Kurbsky, after losing a battle, goes over to the enemy, and Staritskaya sets out to assassinate Anastasia because her attachment to Ivan keeps her relatives in check. She tricks Ivan into letting her drink from a poisoned cup. After Anastasia dies, Ivan is convinced by his chief henchman Malyuta (Mikhail Zharov), Aleksei Basmanov, and Alexei’s son Fyodor (Mikhail Kuznetsov) to confederate a force of commoner supporters who will become totally loyal to him. Ivan does so, creating the Oprichnina, and then leaves Moscow for a small town to wait for the people to demand his return.

Eisenstein had moved a long way from Socialist Realism, as well as the mostly efficient, but rather stagy style then dominant in most western national cinemas. His work here is a constant flow of synergistic illustrations in which the actors are as angular and bristling as the set details and props. Eisenstein never meant, of course, for Ivan the Terrible to be his final, summary work, but that’s what it became, and it’s interesting that the film stands at a nexus, filled with allusions not only to the historical past, but also to cinematic past. It references silent film expressionism, particularly Paul Leni’s Waxworks (1924, the last episode of which was a similar fantasia on Ivan), and Josef von Sternberg’s The Scarlet Empress (1934) throughout in the sheer organic tangle of the historical Russia on display. The amusing casting of Pudovkin, one of Eisenstein’s greatest colleagues/rivals of the silent era, adds to this impression. Yet it’s also a forward-looking work, newly sophisticated in the blending of Eisenstein’s belief in a symphonic, constantly flowing imagism and the techniques of sound cinema. Where Alexander Nevsky needed its Prokofiev score much more than it needed dialogue, here the anti-realistic dramatic exchanges are nonetheless important. The next generation of Russian directors like Andrei Tarkovsky and Sergei Paradjanov would build upon Ivan the Terrible’s precepts for constructing a totally immersive kind of cinema.

Eisenstein had become interested in kabuki theatre when visiting Japan in the late ’20s, and that experience bore fruit here in the intense, highly formalised gesturing and precisely choreographed movements and expressions of the acting. Such an element is easy to mischaracterise: within these theoretically stifling parameters the actors are still good, and Cherkasov pulls off the difficult demands made on his performance with fixity of purpose in uniting disparate and original approaches to filmic drama, particularly as his Ivan deepens from self-righteous crusader to sardonic, mocking ogre. But it’s also a long way from traditional realism. The architecture throughout the film’s elaborate set design subordinates humans to the caprices of space or the lack of it, like the many low doors that require the actors to bow to get through, and the Escher-like, criss-crossing stairwells and passages where nothing is either truly private or expansively free. Ivan the Terrible takes the historical remoteness and Byzantine atmosphere of dread and deceit as licence to paint the setting as a primal and psychologically manifest expression of a corrupt and dangerous world.

Initially, however, Eisenstein’s film enshrines a vision of Ivan that is idealised and idolising, and geopolitical resonances are easily and aptly mined. Ivan, first glimpsed as a fresh, energetic man in his prime who declares he’s going to take on the world and win with a young man’s self-conviction, is feted as a hero standing up for his nation and his subjects against entrenched aristocratic interests. He declares his plans whilst still in the cathedral, to the shock and outrage of both the boyars and the church, to tax everyone, maintain a standing army, and secure domestic control over seaports and trade routes currently controlled by other nations. Foreign envoys watch and peevishly predict his failure in his reforms and mock his pretensions to being Tsar of all Russia, except for a bespectacled Pole who notes, “If he’s strong enough, all will agree.”

Ivan is painted as the man willing to do anything to ensure the unity of his nation as the only way it can stand up to the invasions of other countries. This point is proven quickly when the envoys from Kazan come to declare war on Muscovy, and the delegate gives Ivan the gift of a knife with which to commit honourable suicide. Ivan instead reacts with exultation at the challenge, eager to prove the potency of his new super-state. When the band of furious common folk, led by Nikolai, invade the palace wanting to clobber boyar heads, Ivan comes to meet them and promises them that criminals trying to stir up panic by falsifying bad omens in the populace will be caught and executed, a promise that impresses them. “We will crush sedition, eliminate the treason!” Ivan declares in repeated variations, and even on the battlefield he’s being warned against the potential treachery of boyars, seeming to justify Stalin’s paranoid purges of the Red Army. A subplot invokes Ivan’s efforts to trade with England, sending envoys to tell the English to send their ships into the White Sea to Archangelsk, both a true historical detail and a neat echo of the convoy supply route between Britain and Russia still running when the first film was released. Ivan’s retreat from Moscow and subsequent restoration resemble that flight from Moscow by Stalin, Eisenstein, and the government when the Nazis reached the city’s suburbs.

Gold coins poured on Ivan at his coronation prove to be the first line of a narrative rhyme, for later, dishes are filled with coins by soldiers marching to war with Kazan, to be collected after battle to accurately count the dead: such is the precise totemic reflection of Ivan’s power over the people and theirs over him. The subsequent siege sees Kurbsky stringing up Mongol prisoners on the Russian barricades, the arrows fired by their brethren in the city killing the pinioned captives, before the sapping under the city results in a colossal mine blowing a hole in the fortifying wall. When Ivan falls ill after capturing Kazan, he begs the boyar grandees to swear allegiance to his son while sprawled weak and disoriented on the floor and pleading with physically helpless. but emotionally powerful despair. Their stone-faced gloating makes clear just how much he’s alienated them; Ivan’s determination leaves him increasingly isolated and lacking people he can trust, losing first Kurbsky, and then his wife, a lack he sets out to correct by forming the Oprichnina.

Ivan even begs Fyodor Kolychev to return to civic life and take over as Metropolitan of Moscow, but even he proves more an enemy than friend, as he lets his boyar relatives talk him into trying to curb Ivan’s power with his religious authority. When Kolychev tries this, Ivan ruefully declares, “From now on, I shall be exactly what you call me—terrible!” The general tone of the film is increasingly dark and twisted, played out quite literally in the acting styles, in the perpetual glower of Staritskaya and Ivan’s hawkish, increasingly gargoyle-like appearance, his swooping, bowing, and hunched-over stances. Yet there is still humour in the film, particularly in Eisenstein’s wittily framed, visual puns and dense, Brueghel-esque shots. Ivan’s European coronation guests, reacting in outrage to his plans, have great, frilled collars that fill the screen and seem to interlock, a wall of impressive, yet easily demolished starched cloth. The King of Poland’s court possesses a chessboard floor upon which the knights and bishops and pawns pose. At Ivan and Anastasia’s wedding, the camera peers directly down the length of the table as the guests strike their cups together over the rows of identical candelabra. Mulyata, to unnerve the boyars, stalks about the palace literally peeling his eye to remind all and sundry that he’s always on the lookout.

Interestingly, however, whilst the first part is generally regarded as the best, I found it merely a cheque that Eisenstein wrote and then cashed with the second part. Part II – The Boyar Conspiracy sees the rush of pageant-like, sprawling historical detail give way to only a relative few, almost operatic key scenes, and the flat, declarative, dramatic pitch of the first part likewise resolves into something more subtle and emotionally penetrating. I suspect the Ivan the Terrible diptych had a large influence on how Francis Coppola conceptualised the first two The Godfather films for the screen, for those gangster films follow a similar arc in setting up Michael Corleone as a self-justifying antihero, and then slowly revising the portrait into that of a craven, self-deluding monster. The second episode alters the meaning of the film considerably, as the characters and their different viewpoints become more substantial, and Ivan alters from posturing hero to sardonic, mean-spirited tyrant. The boyars likewise cease to be a mere implacable mass of impediments: the moral quandary of Kolychev is given credence as he tries to curb Ivan’s power and save lives. When the two clash in church before an audience of boyars, a piece of religious theatre plays out with children acting out a parable about the King of Babylon who would have executed three Israelites if not for an angel’s intervention, a part Kolychev is called on to play; the parable is pointed enough to make children watching realise Ivan is the wicked king. There’s a tacit acknowledgement here of the power of smuggled messages in drama that hints why the film’s portrayal of Ivan is being revised. Small wonder Stalin was so furious at Eisenstein the second time around.

In Part II, Ivan is still mourning Anastasia’s death, and, realising that she was poisoned and that Staritskaya was almost certainly responsible, faces a crisis that violates one of his few remaining ideals, the untouchable nature of the royal family. Similarly, he gives Kolychev permission to retain power over him in condemning people for the sake of retaining at least one nominal friendship, but this decision provokes another crisis: Ivan can’t be seen to be accountable. Instead, he lets the Basmanovs and Malyuta talk him into letting the Oprichniki off the leash. They scour the royal palace, drag out the boyars who had resisted paying his war tax or otherwise interfered with their plans, and slice their heads off. As this is happening, Ivan contorts in conscientious anxiety, but when he comes out and sees the dead bodies, he bows to them, crosses himself, and declares, “Not nearly enough!” Meanwhile the boyarina’s attachment to her dimwit son, whose high cheekbones and large eyes make him look more than a little like a cross-dressing Marlene Dietrich, is portrayed as blending peculiar, discomforting impulses. One supposes initially that Staritskaya wants to put her son forward as Tsar because she can control him easily, but it also proves to be because she worships her twit of a lad. She cradles him comfortingly and sings a lullaby about a beaver being killed to provide him with clothing for his coronation, a display of maternal care that’s more than a little perverse and disquieting, least of all in how power, violence, and child-rearing have become inextricable in her psyche.

The portraits of a Vladimir as a man who can’t really grow up and a mother who’s all-controlling counterpoint a long flashback in which Ivan recounts to Kolychev his own childhood: he saw his mother die from poison and grew up surrounded by boyars who manipulated him and ran the state for him, until he finally rebelled and confirmed his own power by having a bullying minister dragged away. This tale lends psychologically deterministic weight to the portrait of Ivan, and also elucidates how his idealism is tempered by a constant, vengeful hatred that all too easily leaks out to infect his entire political life.

With Anastasia dead, he essentially marries his bodyguards. This peculiar relationship culminates in the film’s greatest scene (shot in colour), a bizarre, florid, homoerotic banquet sequence during which the Oprichniki dance in drunken hysterics, led by Fyodor Basmanov clad in drag, and sing a childish song about chopping off heads. Here, Sergei Prokofiev’s score cuts loose in dizzying, raucous strains as the Oprichniki stamp feet and clap hands in rows and fling themselves about in breathtakingly energetic kazatchok moves. It’s clear that Ivan has created a kind of morbidly erotic cult in his followers. When Vladimir drunkenly warns Ivan about an assassination attempt awaiting him when he leaves the banquet to attend to morning prayers, Ivan, instead of being grateful, mockingly dresses his guileless cousin in his own royal vestments, and then sends him out in his place to be stabbed to death by the lurking assassin. Staritskaya rushes out to crow over what she imagines is her defeated foe’s body, only for Ivan to strut out unharmed. The boyarina gathers up her son’s body and starts singing the same lullaby to him. Ivan won’t touch her, and even has the malicious gall to free the assassin, for he has “killed our greatest enemy.” He’s Ivan the Terrible, and he’s also a real stinker.

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Andrei Tarkovsky is both notorious and adulated amongst movie fans as the maker of some of the most objectively forbidding films ever made, as well as several of the greatest. His patient, immersive, unique style represents one definitive extreme in how to fashion cinema. Tarkovsky’s movies are exemplified by their attempts to articulate things that are virtually inexpressible, and yet still, somehow, are part of the common pool of experience. Tarkovsky wanted to provoke his audience to higher levels of awareness and engagement with the processes occurring in the cinematic space before them, and to force them to deal with their own preoccupations and interpretations. As such, his films manage to convey two almost disparate visions of film as an art, as the working definition of eccentric, anti-populist, “challenging” cinema, and yet also the products of an artistic sensibility that prizes and respects the viewer’s receptivity. Tarkovsky’s approach could become enigmatic, even abstract, but at the same time he seemed to be trying to avoid mere obscurity or alienation: for the most part his images, conveyed through his famous fondness for long takes and extended shots that sometimes seem to be searching for some event or epiphany to give them purpose, are deceptively lucid, even guileless. And yet he knew precisely when and how to starve the audience’s flow of information, to force their interactive engagement with his material, the opposite of becoming absorbed by a standard narrative flow. For Tarkovsky cinema was not so much an intellectual game to be solved and broken down, but rather to be experienced on an emotional and intuitive level as well as the intellectual, but with a far broader and less forced definition of experience and emotion than that offered by most commercial cinema. Tarkovsky could offer some of the familiar elements of fine cinema, like smart writing, a vivid story, and nuanced acting, as much as any director, but subordinated them to his own cinematic ideals. In any event, his road less travelled represented a partial rejection of the hitherto definitive Griffith-Eisenstein model of filmmaking, even as Tarkovsky expanded on some of Eisenstein’s later impulses.

Stalker, his fifth film, was adapted by sibling writers Boris and Arkady Strugatsky from their own novel, and followed up Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1971) as an eminently different kind of science fiction movie. Stalker commences in a hovel in an industrial wasteland, the camera scanning the three sleeping members of a family sharing a bed in seemingly perfect contentment, and also noting the objects sprawled on the bedside table, including two enigmatic pills. The man (Alexander Kaidanovsky) is the film’s eponymous protagonist: he’s known as Stalker, but he’s only one of a number who apparently share his profession as Stalkers. This one, our Stalker, awakens and dresses. He tries to sneak out without his wife’s knowledge, but she awakes and upbraids him for recommencing a dangerous line of work that’s already seen him thrown in prison. He meets up with two men in a local tavern that’s as seamy as his place. The two men agree at the outset to only use nicknames based on their occupations—thus “Writer” (Anatoli Solonitsin) and “Professor” (Nikolai Grinko)—and begin the difficult process of penetrating the Zone. The Zone is a mysterious area, so the Professor tells the Writer, that seems to have sprung up since some kind of meteorite or other mysterious object came from the sky and devastated an area of ground. A legend sprang up that a room in one of the buildings in the area had become a space where any entrant’s wish might come true. This, more than the fear of fallout or other danger, made the authorities paranoid enough to entirely fence off the Zone and place armed patrols around it.

Yet the authorities are also deadly afraid of stepping within the Zone for reasons the Stalker tries to sensitise his charges to: the Zone’s environment is constantly changing, full of unseen forces that can kill a man in the blink of an eye. He can only navigate about the place by gut instinct and by tossing objects, usually nuts tied up in cloth, in a random direction. Stalker was schooled in the way of the Zone by a man nicknamed Porcupine, who mysteriously became rich after leaving the Zone, and then killed himself a week later. Stalker spots evidence of Porcupine’s final, apparently malicious damage and rearranging of landmarks within the Zone, something that makes the already precarious job of navigation all the more difficult. Fragments of mysterious magic are glimpsed: the earth at one point seems to throb as if on fire within; later, two birds are seen to fly over a sandpit, with one disappearing and the other flying safely past. Yet none of the dangers Stalker warns about actually strike the Writer and the Professor: the latter turns back to collect his knapsack in spite of Stalker’s imperative command not to, and the Writer safely crosses the threshold of a sandpit before the Stalker shouts a belated warning. Debating about the nature of the Zone, about their own life assumptions and what exactly finding a room that grants a wish might entail, the trio steadily approaches the object of their journey.

Tarkovsky’s career is often considered in tandem with Stanley Kubrick’s. Tarkovsky’s first science fiction film Solaris is called a more romantic, less Nietzschean 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Stalker, in its way, also suggests the latter film’s notions of humanity on the cusp of great transcendence or total degradation and anticipates aspects of The Shining (1981) in exploring the ambiguities of empirical existence and presenting situations where psychological credulity and supernatural obscurity are difficult to distinguish. Stalker is an epic odyssey, a purified quest narrative with roots in the most ancient myth and the traditions of folkloric parable, which, ironically, involves only the most minimalist props and actions. In spite of the film’s ambling pace and stark yet dreamy, paranoid yet becalmed atmosphere, it’s a work of cerebral but clear-cut ideas familiar from both its essential genre of science fiction, and from a distinctive strand of Eastern European fantastic and satiric drama. But the ideas are almost entirely manifested through talk, gesture, and emotion, rather than visualisation: the world around the character rarely deviates from the same old solid, empirical reality. Stalker can be described, on one level, simply as a film about three guys who walk around an overgrown industrial site for three hours, except for certain moments when something amazing and bizarre happens, possessing a precise, coiled, yet still inscrutable strength.

The bulk of Stalker was shot around a disused hydroelectric plant in Estonia, and some believe the pollution around the site was directly responsible for Tarkovsky, Solonitsin, and several others who worked on the film all dying of cancer within a decade. If true, such a tragic real-life consequence feels nonetheless all too harshly appropriate considering some of Stalker’s essential themes. Retrospective analysis has recast the film as a prediction of Chernobyl, a notion that seems absurd, and yet there’s no deep mystery to this seeming echo of future horrors. Soviet industrialisation, not to mention Nazi invasion, had long been making an environmental hell out of swathes of the country. To this day, millions of hectares in Siberia are caked in oil spewed out by decayed infrastructure. Chernobyl was merely the loudest, climactic act in that process of breakdown and despoiling, and the dark imprint of industrialisation’s by-products were surely already quite familiar to Tarkovsky and the Strugatskys. Other aspects are equally suggestive: Stalker’s daughter is a slightly mongoloid-looking girl who can’t walk because she reportedly has no legs, and misshapen children are apparently common amongst Stalkers’ families. Such information is immediately redolent of thalidomide and radiation birth defects.

The haze of everything malefic in the modern industrial world therefore hangs over the film in a thick pall, both metaphorically and, in the early scenes, quite literally. There’s a bleak, totalitarian aspect to the world we catch glimpses of, with the roaming security guards who randomly shoot off guns to try to cut down infiltrators of the Zone, factories billowing out smoke and grime, and locomotives that thunder past Stalker’s house. It could all be a particularly scabrous portrait of the decaying Soviet Union, a notion that’s particularly hard to resist considering that Stalker, with his shaven head redolent of the Gulag, angrily states “everywhere is a prison!”, and the Professor contends with his threatening, authoritarian boss over the phone. And yet they may also be just carefully structured visions of a perfectly ordinary modern nation, most of which have their rust belts, petty official and state-sponsored thugs, and top-secret areas.

When the Writer first appears, he’s come directly from a party, still pretty drunk, driven to the rendezvous by a chicly dressed young woman in a slick car who wants to join the expedition. The pair could easily belong to any society circle: Stalker simply, strictly tells the girl to go, and she speeds away, her whim casually extinguished. The Zone can be interpreted as a bomb-testing site or battlefield that’s become overgrown, but within which radiation or landmines still lurk. Shattered, rusting tanks and armament litter the Zone, remnants of the ill-fated attempts by the government, so Stalker recounts, to penetrate the Zone with military force. The detritus of a pulverised patch of civilisation is likewise scattered: in a long, seemingly pointless, but actually vital moment half-way through the film, Tarkovsky’s camera drifts away from his protagonists to study the material scattered in a waterway. Icons, books, prints, documents, ornamentation, machinery, medical equipment, a gun, utensils, and sundry other remnants of civilisation lie in a kind of dreamy stasis in the water. The Zone itself is steadily reclaiming all human materials into itself, which, whilst seemingly dominated by nature, has its own withholding, inhuman mystery restored.

Meanwhile, the Writer and the Scientist bicker and debate as they follow Stalker. That they stand in not only for their different professions, but also for philosophical disparities, is all too obvious, and the Writer lives up to his part with moments of sodden boorishness and self-pity with a certain level of stereotypical zest. He needles the Professor, a physicist who worked for a government department that seemingly oversees the Zone, over the inadequacies of his empirical worldview in the face of a place like the Zone, and the universe in general. Stalker’s natural, almost primitivist, crypto-spiritual intuition stands in contrast to both men’s forms of intellectualism. Writer nicknames him, half-pejoratively, “Chingachgook,” after James Fenimore Cooper’s Indian hero, and “Pathfinder” would be just as apt for Stalker, who feels rather than thinks his way across the landscape. What lends these schematic figures weight is the way everything is both abstracted to the point where almost nothing literal and everyday is identified definitively, so that the drama unfolding here can stand in for any era and many potential parables, and yet it’s all composed of entirely three-dimensional images and settings so potent in the physical details that you can practically smell the landscape, the characters sharply played and defined. In a way, Stalker is akin to a children’s game—remember how you once declared some random object a castle, and the ground suddenly became lava, and you had to find a way over it?

A similar sense of random danger and reality’s familiar rules rendered capricious dominates in the Zone. Indeed, Stalker expressly describes the Zone as capricious. Stalker relates to the Zone as a religion, a god, and quotes scripture incessantly: one of his more suggestive quotes comes directly after that long view of the detritus in the water, in which he speaks of men who did not recognise Jesus when he came to them because of his altered garb, suggesting that something within the story – the Zone perhaps, or perhaps Stalker himself, or his daughter – may be another divine messenger. At another point, Stalker recites passages from Revelations, and the mysterious object that fell to earth suddenly suggests the “star called Wormwood” from the same book, thus shifting the resonances of the story towards the apocalyptic.

Stalker defines the Zone as a place for people in a state of crisis and without hope; only the desperate can survive the Zone’s caprices, and perhaps only the Wishing Room can solve their problem. The Writer comes to view the Zone essentially as a heart of darkness, a regressive place that will reduce one’s will to a core, key desire, one that will become the “wish” in contradiction of any false (civilised) value one holds and tries to assert. An idealist may also be driven by covert misanthropy, and this hidden aspect will then define the wish. This view seems highlighted by the recounted fate of Porcupine, an enigmatic tale the Writer slowly unravels thanks to some of Stalker’s stories. Porcupine lured his talented poet brother there to be annihilated, and then, breaching the Stalkers’ code, entered the Wishing Room himself and received wealth. His suicide upon returning to the world was because he regretted killing his brother, but when he returned to wish for his brother’s return, the Zone would not grant it, because the original wish was truer. The threat of the wishes of utopians and religious freaks is as terrifying to the Writer and the Professor as those of the vengeful and the vicious. The Writer suggests his crises of faith and imagination at the outset when he tells the girl, “The world is governed by cast-iron laws, and it’s excruciatingly boring!” Cynical and driven by doubt, as he readily, even proudly, admits, he also seeks a proof of a god that will imbue his efforts with meaning. And yet he ultimately doesn’t want proof: he begins to understand that his doubt is a kind of weapon. The Professor is so scared of the Wishing Room’s potential that his own personal mission is to detonate an atomic bomb he’s been carrying in his knapsack in the Wishing Room, thus ridding the world of the threat entirely. Stalker tries to stop this, but Writer instead holds Stalker back, accusing Stalker of enjoying playing God in helping people reach the Wishing Room.

Stalker defends himself merely as a mediator, a man who tries to lead other men to the edge of something restorative. He seems more like a holy fool, and when he returns home he convulses in pain, both physical and emotional—that’s what those two pills (aspirin) were for—as he frets over the misanthropy and distrust of the two savants. On whatever level he believes in the Zone, as manifestation of the alien or even of the imagination itself, he worships its power. The possibility that the preternatural qualities of the Zone are an invention of Stalker’s is mooted, for the Professor learned everything about the place from him. There’s certainly something strange about the Zone is certain, confirmed by an opening scrawl written by a “Professor Wallace,” who may or may not be the same Professor in the film, the efforts of the guardians to keep people out of it, and the warnings of the Professor’s boss, but the peculiarity of the Zone might not necessarily be what Stalker says it is. What is certain is that Stalker takes his devotion to his job as seriously as any medieval monk. Such devotion is echoed by his wife, who recites a monologue directly to the camera stating that in spite of her writhing ecstatic tantrum at the outset, she’s never been unhappy with Stalker, knowing what she did about the dangers and how their children often ended up right from the start. Whether this can be read as a simple encomium to devotion as a trait in itself, or connected more deeply to her understanding of his sense of mission, such familial completeness as is seen at the start is both outset and endpoint of Stalker’s own journey. Stalker considers, at one point, moving his family into the Zone, reasoning they’ll be beyond harassment there.

For all the oblique, pensively intellectual, arty qualities of the film, it’s worth noting how unfussy the visuals are, and the workmanlike expertise with which Tarkovsky builds tension, particularly in the long, brilliantly orchestrated scene in which Stalker has the Writer enter a tunnel he dubs “the meat-grinder” because of the number of people who have died trying to traverse its length, and his subsequent stumbling into the sandtrap. Likewise, a certain wry, even black comedy percolates throughout, as when the Professor disappears and Stalker gives him up for dead, only to come upon him eating his lunch with ingenuous calm. This aspect of the film provides a definitive punch line once the three are inside the centremost building, only metres away from the Wishing Room. A telephone starts ringing, which the Writer, who was in the midst of one of his rants, picks up. He listens to the voice on the other end, shouts “No this is not a clinic,” slams the receiver down, turns away, and then all three men freeze dead still in sudden awareness of what just happened: this moment is delivered with the comedic precision of a Marx Brothers routine. The Professor’s response to realising there’s still a working telephone in the Zone is to call up his boss, who forbade him going on this mission, to mock him and gloat. The shadows of Beckett and Kafka lay over much of this material, even if the film’s specific flavour is less bludgeoning and negative than their work, and closer in spirit to magic-realism.

Finally, whilst the debates, confessions, and petty in-fighting of the three main characters are fascinating, it’s in Tarkovsky’s images where true wonder and ambiguity lie, refusing any simple reduction of the many interpretations and dimensions of the story, moving beyond the literal, and the literary, and into a realm of total cinema. It’s as if Tarkovsky set himself the task of pitting his images against intellectual formulae, and, amazingly, winning. The Zone retains its threat and mystery when the Writer and the Scientist and even Stalker himself have done everything to reduce its meaning and potential within coherent boundaries. More matter-of-factly, the film’s atmosphere is palpable, and Tarkovsky draws out the strange, poetic beauty of industrial wreckage invaded and infused by rebellious nature, as if in the median ground between civilisation, past, and future.

Where the film’s bookend scenes back in the city are filmed in a near-monochrome with a faintly bronzed tint, the Zone is a sprawl of muted, lustrous colour that returns in two concluding shots of Stalker’s daughter, immediately zeroing in on her as the vessel for something as strange and wondrous as in the Zone. Stalker’s devotion to her, carrying her on his shoulders across the inhospitable landscape, is both pathetic and joyous all at once, almost Dickensian, and yet the very last scene moves into a new realm. Like another, more earthbound, yet equally wondrous version of 2001’s star child, the girl sits in her little hovel vibrating to the passage of trains, stares dimly at glasses on the kitchen table, and begins to move them about telekinetically. Stalker’s adventures in the Zone have resulted in his offspring possessing something deeply abnormal, perhaps inhuman, and potentially terrifying. Yet Tarkovsky lets a snatch of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” creep into the soundtrack, suggesting that where now the world shakes her house, some day she’ll shake the world right back.

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In the decade after he reshaped cinema with his then-experimental technique in works like Strike (1924), Battleship Potemkin (1925), and October (1928), Sergei Eisenstein became a peripatetic semi-exile when Stalin’s rise made life uncomfortable for him at home, and the international film scene beckoned. And yet he became a world-famous artist without a friendly harbour to anchor in. A visit to Hollywood had seen him patronised by David Selznick when he handed in his screenplay adapted from Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy: “It was for me a most memorable experience,” Selznick wrote to RKO executive B. P. Schulberg, “The most moving script I have ever read…Is it too late to try to [dissuade] the enthusiasts of the picture from making it?” An attempt to make what Eisenstein described as “a shabby travelogue into a really major film,” Que Viva Mexico!, with the backing of leftist writer Upton Sinclair as his producer, resulted in an unfinished pile of beautiful fragments. Eisenstein slunk back to the USSR, fortunately missing the worst years of the Great Purge.

With geopolitics in an awful state—Soviet Russia was expecting conflict with Germany’s Nazi regime—Eisenstein’s return seemed well-timed as he commenced work on a film that would evoke historical parable for resistance against invasion. His credited codirector Vasilyev and coscreenwriter Pyotr Pavlenko were imposed collaborators, charged with the job of keeping the taint of “formalism” out of the project. When the movie had been completed and rushed into theatres, Hitler and Stalin signed their nonaggression pact, and Eisenstein found himself and his film embarrassedly stowed away, only to be rehabilitated when war between the two superstates finally did break out. In spite of all these weighty matters, Alexander Nevsky in many ways sits with some comfort amongst other historical adventure films in the late ’30s, particularly the Michael Curtiz-Errol Flynn films like The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936) and The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), and Cecil B. DeMille films like The Crusades (1935). Unlike those brash, breezy, technically more polished films, Eisenstein pares back as much drama as possible to concentrate on the synergistic flow of his shots and carefully built rhythmic intensity. The storyline operates on the most primal of levels.

Set against the macrocosmic drama facing the assailed city-states of the Rus, with oppression by the Mongol Golden Horde on one side and the advancing fanatical forces of the Teutonic knights on other, Eisenstein pits characters who might have stepped directly out of a folktale: warriors Vasily Buslai and Gavrilo Olexich (Nikolai Okhlopkov and Andrei Abrikosov), best of friends competing to win the hand of beautiful Novgorod maiden Olga (Vera Ivashova), who declares she will marry the man who proves himself bravest in battle; Vasilisa (Aleksandra Danilov), whose father is executed by the Germans when the city of Pskov is captured through treachery by the Knights, takes up a sword herself and joins the massing Russian resistance; Ignat (Dmitriy Orlov), an aged armourer who becomes embodiment of native pluck in venturing into battle; and Alexander himself (Nikolai Cherkasov), warrior chief of Vladimir who gained the sobriquet “Nevsky” for beating off a Swedish army on the banks of the Neva, the embodiment of sober, conscientious kingship.

Alexander is first glimpsed when a train of Mongols dragging captive Russians off for forced labour pass by a fishing party, and the peasants and Mongol soldiers begin to clash. Alexander shouts from the water, “Quiet! The fish will take fright!” Striding ashore, he exchanges loaded words with the smiling, autocratic Golden Horde khan (Lyan-Kun). Apart from his cutting, commanding voice and bright, challenging, innately intelligent eyes, Alexander is indistinguishable in his manner and dress from the men he leads, and his casual willingness to get his feet dirty in leading the fishing party contrasts the Mongol, who has a soldier prostrate himself to make a step for him to get into his litter. This scene serves a double purpose: it helps the film overcome the inevitable problem in a Soviet work of the era of how to make a hero of a king, and, more pertinently, establishes Alexander’s character: making no more fuss than necessary and with a goal in mind, he’s receptive to any incidental intuition. Later, he gets the inspiration for his battle strategy from a bawdy joke. In my favourite moment of Cherkasov’s in the film, Alexander paces in distraction and quiet agony around his palace where two of his liegemen mend their fishing net, anticipating the call to fight the Germans and wondering how to beat this formidable enemy. Alexander contemplates the strands of the net, and then tears them apart in frustration: “This is delicate work…not like fighting Swedes…”

When the delegates do arrive to beg his aid, he declares with new life: “I know nothing of defence! We attack!” Alexander becoming captain to the Rus is preceded by a fierce communal argument in which the citizens of Novgorod, closest to the onward sweep of the Germans, listen to the testimony of those who have escaped from Pskov. Rich merchants and paid agents argue to make a deal with the knights, but the evidence of mangled survivors and treachery infuriates the patriots who shout down the rich men and demand competent leadership: Domash (Nikolai Arsky), a warrior of standing who is their initial choice, turns down the job, insisting that only Alexander can win for them. Alexander replies that the warrior elite of Rus can’t win, and calls for a national uprising; the very earth itself disgorges streams of peasants used to hiding from marauders converging on Novgorod for an exultant expression of fighting spirit.

Through his montage theory, probably no other director has had such a consequential impact on the development of cinema in general as Eisenstein, but Alexander Nevsky is the film of his that’s had a more particular influence. It’s the perfect model of the few-against-many, good-against-evil epic. Laurence Olivier pillaged it for his Henry V (1945), and it’s hard to imagine movies as popular and diverse as fantasies such as The Lord of the Rings series and Conan the Barbarian (1982), scifi works like the Star Wars saga, and a raft of historical action dramas (David Lean’s films, Spartacus [1960], Braveheart [1995], King Arthur [2004]), without Eisenstein’s model. They quote his optical and editorial tricks, and replicate the dramatic dynamics of his Battle on the Ice sequence. A significant difference between Nevsky and most of the films it influenced, however, is not merely its immediate consequence as a tool for rousing the audience and telling a good yarn, but that it’s a work that channels anthropological and folk-art influences in an attempt to conjure a sense of the past as living tradition, not mere escapism. Nevsky takes the rules of Norse sagas and iconic art seriously to reproduce in part their aesthetics in the context of realistic ’30s cinema.

Sergei Prokofiev’s score, with its chorale commentaries on the action, entwines with recurring visual motifs that evoke that state of Rus in the mid 1200s—a land of bleaching bones after decades of massacres by the Mongols and stranded longboats redolent of the Viking founders of Vladimir and Novgorod—in painting a cultural context, and a harmonious concept of the drama about to unfold as part of Russia’s past and present. Prokofiev’s work on the film was and is one of the signal collaborations between a great cinema artist and a highly regarded classical composer, and it’s still certainly one of the greatest film scores ever recorded, especially if sheer dramatic necessity is a yardstick—the score is so deeply woven into the film it wouldn’t exist in the same way without it, making Nevsky a true pan-cultural creation. Eisenstein and Prokofiev used all available means of achieving that linked effect, composer writing music to the script and director cutting scenes to match material already written. Nevsky is negligibly lessened by a few overly arch moments of propaganda, but moreso by its technical problems. The film was made with an experimental sound system that had a muffling effect on much of the dialogue and especially on the score, and the rush to get the film in theatres forestalled any tweaking.

Eisenstein had one of cinema’s most perfect eyes for composing elements within a frame (think of a shot from a Michael Bay film, and then think of the exact opposite), and his efforts here both extend the high modernism of early Soviet cinema, evident in occasional semi-abstract arrangements, and enrich his visuals with the squared-off perspective of Byzantine-influenced Russian art. In the first half, his compositions are studiously geometric, his actors carefully posing in declarative attitudes: Alexander surveying the expanse of the green Russian dales with an old peasant at his side, or Buslai and Olexich assuming poses in contending for Olga, who constantly stands with back to the two hovering, towering men. This might sound flat and pompous, and yet it’s anything but. What’s remarkable is how Eisenstein uses these qualities to suggest powerful, composing forces, building tension through alternations of hypnotic quiet and tersely delivered dialogue, and violent communal arguments and celebrations on the path from panic and questioning on behalf of the frightened Rus folk to the moment of fearless readiness for the eruptive chaos of battle.

Just as deliberately flat, and yet still lovably vibrant, are the characterisations. On an almost pantomime level, good and evil are chiefly a matter of expression and dress. The Teutonic villains are so stylised in their evil they barely seem like part of the same species, which is very much the point. In their warrior regalia they seem less like an army of God, though they wrap themselves in religious paraphernalia and espouse Roman Catholicism as a totalitarian ideology, than stygian beasts: Ignat describes one as a witch after besting him. Even when they take off their helmets, they’re a mob of lean, grim, self-satisfied-looking bastards, the Grand Master (Vladimir Yershov) coldly declaring that anyone who resists them will be slaughtered, whilst handing out stolen principalities casually to his followers. The traitors who have delivered Pskov into their hands through connivance and rumour-mongering are shifty-eyed and dour, in contrast to the beaming, sunny Russians.

The contrast between Buslai and Olexich is one of two variations on the basic Russian character, made most amusingly clear when they court Olga: apple-cheeked, boisterous Buslai declares, “If you want a fun-loving man, marry me!” To which more somber Olexich retorts, “If want to be beaten with a birch stick every night, choose him indeed.” Olga and Vasilisa, too, form a diptych in thrilling at the great action unfolding before them, but each takes a different path: demure Olga makes her pledge to the two warriors, whilst Vasilisa dons a helmet and chain mail and go to war. It’s Vasilisa versus the Germans, and this time, it’s personal: her father, an elder of Pskov, has been executed before her eyes for denouncing the German invaders—hung from a belltower.

The sequence in Pskov, portraying the evil knights relishing having bound prisoners executed en masse with pikes and screaming children cast into bonfires with the blessing of pet churchmen, is extreme warning and spur to action (one of history’s saddest ironies is that Eisenstein’s apocalyptic manipulation here would soon come to appear too tame). And, of course, in movie language, we know these creeps are ripe to get their asses royally booted. After his advance guard is wiped up thanks to further treachery by the two traitors who are moving back and forth between the lines, Alexander, against the nervous objections of Buslai, decides to make his stand on Lake Chudskoye, on the boundary between Novgorod and Pskov. There’s actually a lot of historical confusion about just how big (and where) a battle took place on April 5, 1242, with probably far fewer warriors (some place the number at less than a thousand) taking part than is portrayed in the film, but of course, everyone wishes it happened the way this film tells it. The Battle of the Ice sees Eisenstein’s camera, as well as the heroes, let loose with symphonic ferocity, and it’s one of those few film sequences that can tear an almost physical reaction from me.

The vignettes of the battle are more memorable than most entire films: the early shots of the ranked Russians, Vasilisa and Ignat amongst them, waiting anxiously under stormy clouds on the great white nothing of the lake, peering into the distance as they try to make out the slowly emerging mass of German cavalry; Buslai and Olexich, after days of resenting each other, embracing before taking their posts; the Teutonic knights riding in with their encasing helmets looking like aliens, robots, steampunk tanks; Prokofiev’s music rising to its most menacing and tremendous swells, low chugging horns and high shrieking string, until the two armies crash into each other in whirls of steel and limbs; Olexich and Alexander’s charge to close the trap; Olexich hurling himself in front of Alexander to save his life and getting a chest full of spear points; the horrified expressions of the traitors in watching the knights lose; Vasilisa working up the courage to come out of her hiding place on a wagon, braver and braver in striking out at the Germans.

Particularly riveting is how Eisenstein switches from occasional long shots, in which the formations of the armies and tussling, fragmented gangs, form almost abstract patterns, to handheld shots within the melee, concussive in their immersive, you-are-there vigour. One moment, when Eisenstein cuts from Alexander’s victories over an opponent to the laughing faces of onlookers and the exultation of musicians cheering on the team, makes the battle reminiscent of a sports film. My favourite moment is when Buslai, losing his sword, is tossed a wooden spar by Vasilisa, with which he joyfully bashes in the stout helmets of the knights, releasing a whoop of exultation as he bounces the spar from hand to hand like a hot potato, high on his own conquering strength; later, when Buslai dresses in a fallen German’s uniform, he clobbers his way out from inside their ranks. Alexander’s final duel with the Grand Master sees him finally topple the villain before the Germans take flight and are swallowed in the Biblical moment when the lake’s ice gives way and plunges them into the frigid brine.

Fittingly, Eisenstein intended this sequence in part as a tribute to the other great progenitor of cinema language, D. W. Griffith—specifically, the ice-floe scenes in Way Down East (1920). Even greater than the battle, in a more subtle way, is the aftermath, the lake ice a charnel house of broken bodies, wounded and dying men calling for their loved ones, both Olexich and Buslai lying crippled as night falls. The women of Novgorod, including Olga, come out on the ice bearing torches to search for their loved ones, a female voice on the soundtrack voicing the sentiments of the scene in desolate fashion. Rarely has a film of this sort paid such attention to the cost of even heroic triumph. The final scene is, however, one of victory and resolution, as the traitors and captive Germans haul sled-loads of the wounded, and Buslai declares, in defiance of his mother, that neither he nor Olexich were as brave as Vasilisa, allowing Olexich and Olga to marry because he’s found his girl in Vasilisa, a delightfully neat clincher to the quandary. The result is one of those few films that makes the boundary between high art and blissful entertainment melt away. l

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From amongst his too-few crop of marvels, Sergei Paradjanov’s best-known film alongside 1968’s Sayat Nova, was Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, and it was the one that made his name. Although rendered in a similar hallucinatory, totemistic, folk-myth design as Sayat Nova, Shadows is quite different in that it at least tells a concrete, discernible narrative, managing to conjure something like the immense, segmented sprawl of classical sagas in an hour and a half. Where the later film tackled the cultural landscape of Paradjanov’s native Armenia, Shadows, based on a novella by Mikhaylo Kotsyubinsky, describes the culture of the Ukrainians of the Carpathian Mountains in the eighteenth century (as suggested by the flintlock pistols the men carry), but could, in truth, be of almost any time. Whilst Shadows offers up the dramatic and tragic life of Ivan (Ivan Mikolajchuk), and his Romeo-and-Juliet love affair with Marichka (Larisa Kadochnikova), the story provides a mere framework for Paradjanov’s visuals fugues and ritualised evocations.

Nothing has meaning in Paradjanov’s films unless it linked to the totality of the natural world and the chains of tradition. Shadows unfolds in a series of linked, but segmented chapters that both extend Ivanko’s story and portray the world in which he lives, a world that is elemental even in its spirituality. In the first few minutes of the film, the young Ivan (I. Dzyura) loses most of his family. Ivan is almost crushed by a tree his older brother Olexa is felling: Olexa dashes to push Ivan out of the way, and is killed himself. At the church funeral, his father Petyik Paliychuk (Aleksandr Gaj) mocks the wealthier farmer Guteniuk (A. Raydanov) who, he says, “gives money to God but fleeces the poor.” Enraged, especially when Guteniuk’s wife calls him and his wife beggars, Paliychuk pursues him outside and spits insults, until Guteniuk strikes him dead with his axe. Ivan’s mother (Nina Alisova), who’s already lost all her other children and now her husband, and thus cheated of prosperity, maintains a bitter hate of the Guteniuks, but Ivanko’s one redeeming light in life is a daughter of the hated clan, Marichka (V. Glyanko as a girl), whom he first spied at his brother’s funeral. In the melee that followed his father’s murder, he slapped her, but then chased her down and made friends; by the time he had forgotten his father, he was welded to her like steel, sharing a nature-child love, playing in the woods together without clothes.

When the pair grows into young adults, they’re still perfectly in love. But Ivan’s mother’s resentments against the Guteniuks have not faded, so their love can still only manifest beyond the boundaries of the town, in the woods and fields. Ivan goes to earn some money as a shepherd in the mountain pastures above the town. One night, when the land is wreathed in a thick fog and the shepherds work to keep their flocks together, Marichka wanders out into the forest, drawn by the light of a strange star. She comes across a lost black lamb on a steep ledge, and, trying to rescue it, plummets to her death in the surging river below. Ivan joins search parties looking for her and comes across her beached, frigid body. He spends the next few years in a state of unproductive grief, increasingly tattered and slovenly, his looks lost behind a beard and filth. He slowly returns to a normal life helping the local church, and especially when he encounters Palagna (Tatyana Bestayeva), a young woman with an estate; they share a charged moment when he shoes her horse and she laps up the sight of him. They are soon married, but the past and the future for these two soon prove sadly tangled.

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is an immersive experience in the best sense, demanding a reorientation of narrative priorities and outlook, but rewarding that attention with a vigorous sprawl of fantastic images and vividly envisioned metaphors. Many filmmakers, especially more contemporary ones, would try to capture a sense of the historic and the alien through a kind of minimalist preciousness, but that was as alien to the madly inventive Paradjanov as blockbuster action. He created images with physical force and expressive enthusiasm, with some visions, like his grand crane shots plunging through forests and swinging over gorges, that seem to defy all physics of film photography. It’s hard then to write about the electric quality of such images as Ivan and Marichka embracing in the woods as a sun shower pelts them with glittering bolts of rain, as if the very elements are blessing them.

The spiritual is innately physical here, and the film’s soul, like that of the society it portrays, is Christianised, but often still reflexively pagan, even pantheistic. This contradiction is lessened in an environment where nature is all-powerful. Emblems of religion and spirituality are hewn out of the raw materials provided by nature, wood and stone, and the vagaries of the elemental world are cruel and haphazard. “Beggars like them shouldn’t be allowed in here!” the Guteniuk matriarch screams in the church as the Paliychuks mock them, and the church, linchpin of social ritual in the mountain villages, fades into unimportance as magic and misfortune become governing lights: the narrative of Shadows seems to move further back into the mystic past rather than forward with the world, as characters, stripped of what they want, choose deeper, darker alternatives. Marichka’s death, not even halfway through the film, is a truly shocking one that leaves both Ivan and the story in tatters, and picking up the pieces becomes the most arduous of processes. Paradjanov here uses the most effective and simple of devices, bleaching all the colour out of the film, snatches of gossip on the soundtrack charting the village’s reactions to his ruined state as he goes through his labours and bathing with a dissociated disinterest.

Paradjanov’s animated, often first-person camera constantly invokes the experiential, sensual world, tethered to the corporeal and yet charged with spirits unseen and lurking: from Ivanko’s father being bashed on the head by Guteniuk, blood running down over the lens, or the camera seeming to fall with the tree that crushes Olexa, to the whirling camera in the very final scene, life is a disorientating cascade for Ivan. In the most intricately orchestrated sequence, when Marichka is lost and drowns, and as Ivan and the villagers search for her, a hand-held camera chases Ivan and others through the gloom of morning, faces and bodies appearing out of the fog, tumbling down slopes, torches burning in the haze. When Ivan eventually boards a great raft with others to ride down the river in search, Paradjanov’s camera flies overhead in a stunning crane shot, as the vessel emerges from the murk and disappears again like a momentarily substantive dream. Clear geography and visual order are blurred, even as the setting is explored in the most atmospheric of fashions, so that one practically feels Ivan’s adrenalin-stoked, frantic leap to action, resolving finally in a slightly askew shot as Ivan sits on a stone in silent grief, with only the lower half of Marichka’s beached body in the frame. His energetic search, the whole logic of his life, the giddy rush of adolescent love, and the bounty of nature, come to an abrupt, sickened, motiveless halt.

In the second half, Ivan’s marriage to Palagna seems motivated entirely by mutual attraction, and their union, which sees a ceremonial yoke placed over their shoulder whilst they’re blindfolded, a revivifying one for Ivan. On their wedding night, Ivan strips Palagna bare and tears off the last item—a bead necklace, which shatters in his grasp—leaving her breathlessly, silently expectant, and rigidly cautious: a scene that’s teeth-grindingly erotic even as Paradjanov cleverly avoids nudity. Their marriage soon proves to be a haunted disaster, for though they labour prosperously together in the fields, Marichka, desperate for Ivan’s physical love, finds him increasingly unresponsive, and in their first Christmas together, Ivan is struck by the sight of a deer grazing near Marichka’s grave as one did just after she was buried. Both husband and wife begin attempting to commune with the spirit world, unable to face the one immediately in front of them, the sterility of which is confirmed in a wide shot of the couple eating their Christmas feast in silence. Ivan makes offerings of food to attract spirits, and Marichka seems finally to appear to him, gazing forlornly through the window, but Palagna doesn’t see her and pins up a curtain. Later, Palagna strips off her clothes and walks into the night to play shamanka, begging the spirits to make Ivan love her and give her a child.

Paradjanov’s psychology, symbolism, and sorcery come together now, as Palagna is approached by the local magician, Yura (Spartak Bagashvili), stricken with fascination for this transgressive woman who, like himself, is obeisant to older gods. Yura is glimpsed, in the film’s second brilliantly orchestrated sequence, working magic to turn away a destructive storm by enchanting a pair of horses he then rides out into the fields to create a counteractive wind. Exhausted, he falls to the ground, and when Palagna approaches to congratulate him, he begs her to come soothe him. A tree close by explodes in flames as the pair screw on the ground: an image conjoining Yura’s mastery of magical power and his masculine force, as he gives Palagna, who’s been associated visually with dead and barren trees, the orgasm she hasn’t been getting from Ivan. Yura, although not pretty like Ivan, draws all the potency of the physical and spiritual worlds into his frame, and he soon proves the most fearsome of cuckold-makers.

This cruel ménage soon enough comes to a head when Palagna and Ivan go to a tavern and sit at the same table as Yura, and Palagna, when her husband’s not looking, cuddles up to the magus. A friend tells her off, and Ivan fronts up to Yura, but the sorcerer strikes Ivan with a hex. Ivan reels outside, dazed and shattered, and glimpses Yura and Palagna, having clearly claimed each other’s affections. He wanders off through felled woodland, the smoking, severed stumps of what had once been forest perfectly reflecting his now-denuded existence and wasted psyche. As he drinks from a spring, he glimpses Marichka’s spirit, and chases her into the forest, both of them strangely greyed and deathly-looking; when Marichka finally reaches out to touch Ivan, he dies with a scream.

The stinging paradox of this plot—that fulsome, seemingly naturally imbued love isn’t strong enough to hold off a chain of destructive events and the inevitable process of decay, and yet imbues these paltry lives with legendary greatness—defies potential sentimentality, even if the finale’s suggestion that Ivan and Marichka are reunited on another plane isn’t so far from, say, Titanic (1997). That they could only find their fulfillment as shades tied to the forest is a fine and fair solution to the impossibility of their lives and also to the violent brevity of this way of life, and yet it is certainly death, whilst in the film’s very final scene Ivan’s fellow villagers get on with life, turning his wake into a rollicking party. Ivan essentially dies in the same way as his own father, though Yura does not strike Ivan with his axe, instead merely slamming it on the table to work his hex. The reduction of Ivan’s life story to that of an unlucky fool who dies a cuckold after a bar fight seems to contrast the charged atmosphere of mystical meaning, but the immediate and the spiritual are still bound together here, for Ivan’s final failures are offenses to nature as well as mankind. The tree that is Palagna, the living essence, is something Ivan fails to bring to fruit, chasing instead the wispy remnant of eternal, sterile love into the forest.

Throughout the film, events and motives are tangential, especially emotion, extreme passions driving events on with organic but illogical force: Ivan’s father denouncing Guteniuk to expel his grief over Olexa; Ivan slapping Marichka to punish her for her father’s violence and then forgetting his father when being with Marichka; Ivan marrying Palagna to forget Marichka, whom he loses in a totally capricious accident; Palagna’s acts to make Ivan want her putting her in Yura’s orbit and then forgetting her husband. Even the accidents and idiocies of this world are inspired by some other, possibly noble, cause. There’s a coarse, realistic kind of psychology here, where people sublimate one need into another, and small twists of circumstance throw lives entirely off course. Tribal microeconomics are also described with terse import, as the prosperity of the Paliychuks is degraded as their labouring menfolk have been steadily decimated (Mother Paliychuk recites the names of her many lost sons and her husband) and the Guteniuks’ rapacity contrasted, an imbalance with long-reaching, murderous consequences. Ivan is the victim of a world out of equilibrium before he even arrives in it. What holds that world together is communal ritual, the reflexes of which are a refrain of the film’s texture: from Paliychuk’s funeral marchers, tramping in single file across the snow-caked land, to the villagers dancing in a long line, Marichka and other adolescent girls arrayed with sprigs in their hands in the church, blessed in their youthful fertility, and the curious binding motif of Ivan and Palagna’s wedding: universal customs described in specific terms, of course.

The faces and bodies of Paradjanov’s actors are more important than traditional acting abilities; Bagashvili’s fearsome visage suggests a human intermediary with Noh masks. The earthy realism of the cast is so convincing, it’s hard not to believe they weren’t simply recorded for documentary purposes. Which is, of course, very difficult acting, and Bestayeva is particularly compelling, with her blend of desirous disappointment and dismissive pith, snapping with force at Yura when he comes upon her making her naked invocations, “What’s wrong with you? Never seen a woman before?” The achievement of the film is to make the historic and the alien seem as vivid as the life around you, and though Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is a more conventional film than Sayat Nova, it is certainly no lesser. l

In 2006, the world was shocked when a former member of the KGB and its successor after the fall of Communism—the FSB—named Alexander “Sasha “Litvinenko died in a London hosptial, a victim of poisoning from exposure to the radioactive compound polonium 210. His slow and agonizing decline and death were captured in a media circus, particularly in Britain, where he had sought political asylum several years before after going public with information that the FSB ordered contract murders and was corrupt.

Andrei Nekrasov, a Russian filmmaker torn by grief at the fate that had befallen his friend Sasha, set out to investigate the possible reasons for his murder. His journey took him through Russia, Germany, France, and England, where he met people who knew Sasha, worked with him, loved him, and hated him. What he assembled from archival and original footage is a wide-ranging, rambling scar of a movie—a cry of despair and outrage from its maker. Watching Poisoned by Polonium is an exhausting, confusing, sometimes mesmerizing experience in which Nekrasov piles up facts, events, and ideas without really making sense of them.

During the first part of the film, Nekrasov spends an inordinate amount of time on himself—literally. The camera rarely leaves his face as he absorbs what is happening to his friend and reflects on on-camera interviews he conducted with Sasha, presumably for another project, in which Litvinenko railed against what he saw as the nexus of corruption in Russia—Vladimir Putin. In pursuit of the truth, Nekrasov probes the history of late Soviet Russia and events up to the present.

For much of the scene setting, Nekrasov discusses the bombing of apartment blocks in Moscow in 1999, called by the government acts of terror by rebels from Chechnya that eventually precipitated war. In a technique Nekrasov uses frequently in the film, normal life in Chechnya is shown, only to be contrasted with the devastation of war. This rather unnecessary emphasis that war is hell is followed by another frequently used technique—changing locations before a new establishing shot pulls the viewer out of the previous one, thus thoroughly confusing Nekrasov’s point. He seems to want to say that the Chechens are the poor unfortunates by showing their bombed-out homes and war dead, but before we know it, he’s showing Russian war dead and grieving Russian mothers. Of course, this was reality, but then he moves directly to Russians saying that the Chechens deserved it for bombing the apartments and on to conspiracy theories that the FSB planted the bombs themselves to secure Putin’s rise to power. As someone with hardly a nodding acquaintance with current events in Russia, the timelines and particulars of these events were not familiar to me. Nekrasov does little to enlighten me.

What he does do is show how Litvinenko became notorious in Russia for outing the FSB’s corruption and murder schemes. Litvinenko contended that an FSB internal affairs agent Mikhail Trepashkin was framed by other FSB agents for weapons possession because he revealed evidence that the FSB was involved in corruption and may have been involved in the apartment bombings. He was found not guilty but immediately rearrested for revealing state secrets. Nekrasov is told that the judge who dismissed the charges was removed from his position and replaced by one “bought” to serve the FSB and government interests. Litvinenko himself said the FSB tried to buy his participation on their hit squad, but that he refused. He released videos taken through a hidden camera that show his boss Alexander Gusak and others talking about murdering certain individuals. Gusak is interviewed by Nekrasov about the hit squads and Litvinenko, whom Gusak mentored. Gusak now thinks of Litvinenko as a prick.

Another interview subject for Nekrasov is Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist who, at the time of the interview, had just published an article about the rape of Chechen women by Russian soldiers. Nekrasov is shown going all over Moscow trying to find a copy of the journal that published her article—nobody is selling it. Abruptly, we move forward in time to Politkovskaya’s own murder in her Moscow apartment building. Obviously, criticism is taken very seriously in the new Russia.

The film is no marvel of cinematography or editing. Whoever was filming Nekrasov didn’t seem to know how to hold a camera or what to film. While I’ve read charges that Nekrasov appears self-indulgent in this film because he’s in so many of its frames, I’m inclined to think that he had so little usable footage to work with that he had to make do.

More importantly, do all these events and inferences add up to a plot at the highest levels to silence Litvinenko? Nekrasov seeks the advice of French philosopher André Glucksmann, who notes that Russians, subjected for centuries to czarist rule, have a slave mentality—they want a strongman to pull the strings. I admit that I have sometimes thought this myself, but if Putin was a strongman, he’s really not much different from George W. Bush, who was elected by the supposedly most democratic nation in the world. Russian lawlessness during the transition to democracy seems to have progressed much as one would expect in a country where basic deprivations still existed. As prosperity has slowly risen, social order has gained a foothold.

Nonetheless, Nekrasov’s empassioned document, returning belatedly to Litvinenko’s murder and his grieving wife Marina, left me wondering if perhaps there wasn’t something to his theories. I’m usually the first person to pooh-pooh a conspiracy theory espoused by the more-suspicious hubby. This time, the hubby pooh-poohed Litvinenko.

I decided to contact David Southwell, an author of books on organized crime as well as the recently published Conspiracy Files. I became a fan of his blog English Dreaming, English Rain, where he and I became slightly acquainted. David mentioned the death of Litvinenko on his blog, and I wanted his opinion of the documentary and its allegations. Here’s what he said:

While I could not call Alex a close friend, we had talked, and he had provided useful contacts when I was writing about Russian organized crime. However, what a lot of people seem to have forgotten about him since his death was that he was a conspiracy theorist. His bogeyman was Putin, but often behaved in the same way as those whose see Freemasons or the Mafia behind every event from the death of JFK to the name change of Kentucky Fried Chicken to KFC. At times, Alex on Putin was like Abbie Hoffman on Nixon circa 1970.

What I found disappointing about Rebellion is that it was short on context. Putin’s rise to power did not need the bombings; there was little exploration of how much of a failed state Russia already was or how normal this type of false flag conspiracy is. Often, the best you can do is find evidence of a conspiracy, but showing one existed will rarely tell you who was responsible for it. Rebellion failed to provide the tools for its audience to judge which allegations had genuine—and therefore frightening—substance and which, like the claims Alex so often made in person about Putin being a paedophile, were free from the burden of demonstrable facts.

Using the blunt scalpel on common sense and as much of an investigation as I could muster, I concluded last year that Alex was murdered not by agents sent by Putin, but by his friends. Irony indeed that he may have died in a false flag murder to provide a martyr, his strange, lingering death broadcast globally.

Although I am steeped in conspiracy research, I believe that probably only 5% would qualify as genuine conspiracies and even then, determining those responsible is exceptionally difficult. Plausible deniability often means that someone such as Putin would have little direct knowledge of any false flag operation being conducted in his name.

Nekrasov’s problem is that he takes that one conspiracy (the death of Alex) means proof of another. While I think there is good proof that the apartment bombings were a conspiracy, the death of Alex does not provide proof that they were the direct work of Putin. Nekrasov also seems so blinded by anger and grief, that the ‘investigation’ into the death of Alex is terribly lopsided. The film reminded me of a father whose son has been killed in a hit-and-run spewing out allegations, some of which may be likely and true (the bastard must have been drunk) but over which no evidence is presented. Some allegations that come from rage, frustration, and pain and say more about Nekrasov and the world view of those anti-Putin than they do about reality.

I have recently turned down writing a book on Russian crime because of the possibility of writing both safely and accurately is limited. The subject fascinates and is worthy of study, but I feared I would only end up producing another partisan, emotional mess like Nekrasov.

I’m sure you’ll agree with me that David’s thoughts are illuminating, and I thank him for allowing me to quote them here. As a Chicagoan, I’m more than familiar with corruption and violence among those charged with protecting citizens; just today, John Kass wrote in the Chicago Tribune: “Chicago politics have historically been important in the selection of police commanders and top brass. Just a few years ago, even the Chicago mob had a big say in who worked where in the top echelons of the department.” But I think I’d have to agree with David—when it comes to someone you know or something you care about, it’s hard not to end up with an emotional mess. If you can deal with that, Poisoned by Polonium has some solid information for the neophyte to the way Russia works today. l